I had to quit my career as a buyer twice, to finally follow my dream of becoming a full time photographer. The journey not only changed my career path but also changed me. There have been failures along the way, as well as tons of hard lessons to learn but through it all, I have enjoyed moments of pure bliss. The first time I quit, I decided to travel alone and backpack through Southeast Asia at the age of 29. I had decided that this was finally the time to focus on photography. In my mind, I needed just one year to focus on it. The universe would work out the rest. It was a journey that was meant to be solely about photography but ended up being a more of a spiritual journey. This is how it all began.

You know when you just instantly connect with a person. Everything clicks, no explanation, no trying, it just happens. That was India for me.

I landed in Mumbai, backpack on my back, phone in hand and the beginning of my journey. No more spreadsheet living, this was the real deal.

It was a combination of overwhelm and excitement. It was the first time I had travelled by myself. I had to figure out how staying at a hostel was going to be like. I am not good with meeting people for first the time, I tend to retreat and hope to God that someone smiles at me and starts a conversation because I sure won’t. To do that, I would need to have a thirty minute, to an hour conversation in my head, encouraging myself just to say hello. It was one of my major concerns. When someone did talk to me, the bubbly, talkative side, would come out.

Vietnam brought me back to life. When I arrived  in Ho Chi Minh, I had a deep feeling that I had failed. I had struggled to take pictures in Loas and Cambodia that I truly loved. My sole purpose for going on this journey was to take pictures and discover who I was as a photographer. What added to this feeling was I had gone to the War Remnant Museum, when I had just arrived and I remember feeling so moved by the photography. How it exposed the truth about the Vietnam war and thinking at that time, that this is what photography was about. A big part of me wanted my photographs to mean something, to tell a story. I wasn’t there yet and I judged myself for it. I was suffering because I had certain expectations of where I should be at this point and I felt I was nowhere close.  Ho Chi Minh made me stop, accept the fear of not knowing and just let it go. I cried a lot. Spent a lot of time in my dormitory, hardly went out. I moved to different hostels until I accepted that it was my mindset that had to change and not the place.